Our second issue dealing with Urban Fantasy is now available online. In this new installment, you will find six short stories (including one in English), articles on Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City, and on the comics Fables and the TV series Grimm and Once Upon a Time, as well as an interview with French writer Léa Silhol.

Although media keep presenting Fantasy fiction as a genre focused on medieval-inspired worlds, Fantasy has largely invested the contemporary world since the 1980s, especially the modern city. In 1984, Charles de Lint offers with Moonheart a story blending magic, creatures from the Otherworld, and thriller right in the middle of Ottawa. Three years later, Emma Bull, with War for the Oaks, makes the fairies enter 20th century Minneapolis, while editor Terri Windling develops the shared universe of The Borderland Series. Urban Fantasy was born. Since then, we have discovered masterpieces of this subgenre, such as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and American Gods or Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons. Urban Fantasy has also invaded the small screen, namely with the TV series Once Upon a Time and the TV adaptation of The Dresden Files, as well as comics, with for instance Bill Willingham’s Fables.

Now one of the major Fantasy subgenres, Urban Fantasy however arises the issue of the definition of Fantasy. Indeed, by placing its narratives in the modern city and, thus, by making the supernatural occur in “our” world, it reshuffles the cards in the separation between Fantasy and Fantastique/Gothic fiction. Wonder sometimes borders horror and the macabre, reusing Gothic schemes, as it was already the case in Charles de Lint’s Moonheart.

Besides, the recurring use of the principle of a parallel society or dimension to represent Faërie (the Otherworld or Spiritworld in Charles de Lint’s fiction, London Below in Neverwhere, or Faërie as New Erewhon and parallel universe in Tad Williams’s War of the Flowers), as well as, in some narratives, the exploration of alterity in a way which reminds of the mutant theme (see for instance Léa Silhol’s Frontier series in French), also make Urban Fantasy close to Science-Fiction.

It can be similarly observed that many stories include a thriller plot.

Urban Fantasy consequently appears as a borderline subgenre, playing on the frontier between the different imaginative fiction genres, but also between the disenchanted modern world and the marvellous one.

You might question (but not exclusively):

– these multiple frontier games, and the way Urban Fantasy (re)introduces wonder in the modern city. What is the sense of this return of fairies and gods in a world which no longer believes in them?

– the links between Urban Fantasy and the 19th and 20th century urban fictions, or/and detective/crime literature.

Papers (5 to 6 pages maximum) in English or French are to be sent in .doc format, Times New Roman 12 points, single line spacing, before December 20th 2016January 31st 2017 to fantasyartandstudies@outlook.com